The other day I shot a quick image of the DEITY Doubleshot Coffee Mug and I added real steam to the shot. This is something that is fairly easy to do, and while you can find lots of steam overlays online it usually looks better if you create one that matches your product perfectly. I filmed the process so that you could follow along and see how I do it. (I apologize for the poor quality of the video, we have a brand new Sony a7sIII in the studio but on the day I shot this I didn't have a memory card that would work in it. So I shot it with my GoPro Hero 8 in a really dark studio) The video goes through the process of shooting the image of the cup, and then adding boiling water and changing the ISO to get a good image of the steam. I then edited the two images together using Adobe Lightroom and Photoshop. You can see the two original images and the finished image below. The coffee cup image was shot at 100 ISO and thes team image at 5000 ISO.
The Doubleshot Mug was a fairly simple shot, I used two Profoto B1x's with 1x3 stripboxes and grids, and a B1x with a 10 degree grid. The striplights were placed one on each side, you can see the highlights from these in the mug, and the light with the 10 degree grid was placed above and slightly to the front of the mug. It creates a spot of light (larger than the mug) on the wood, and also adds some light to the front and inside of the mug. For the second shot I added boiling water to the mug and changed the exposure to get a image of the steam. When you're shooting with flash in a dark studio the shutter speed has very little effect on the image. So I was left with aperture and ISO to change the exposure. I could have turned the aperture down to 2.8 which would have given me 3 stops more light, but from experience I knew that wasn't enough. I could have also turned the power of the lights way up, but again that wouldn't have been enough. The easy solution was to simply change the ISO. From 100 to 5000 is 5 2/3 stops. (100 -> 200 -> 400 -> 800 -> 1600 -> 3200 -> 5000) The only drawback to this was some increased noise, however we easily deal with that in post using either Lightroom or a noise reduction plugin. Lightroom did a more than adequate job. I then combined the two images using a layer mask on the steam layer to get rid of everything except the steam. By setting the steam layers blending mode to lighten we can use it on a background that isn't just black, however that wasn't really necessary in this image with a black background.
- No Comments